The White House is looking into the leak of passport details of Barack Obama, along with other world leaders at the 2014 G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, and is taking steps to safeguard the president’s personal information, a spokesman has told reporters.
As the Guardian reported on Monday, a bureaucrat in the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection accidentally sent the passport numbers, visa details and other personal information of Obama and 30 other world leaders to organizers of the Asian Cup, a soccer tournament held in Australia in January 2015.
In a “press gaggle” on the president’s aircraft, Air Force One, on Monday morning, the White House deputy press secretary, Eric Schultz, told reporters that the administration is “looking into [the reports] and we’ll take all appropriate steps necessary to ensure the privacy and security of the president’s personal information”.
The breach apparently happened because the Australian bureaucrat sent the email with the information of the world leaders to the wrong person after failing to check the autofill feature in Microsoft Outlook. Among the other world leaders whose information was shared were the British prime minister David Cameron, Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel.
It is unlikely that the information leaked beyond the one errant message. In an email notifying the Australian privacy commissioner of the breach, an immigration official noted that the erroneously addressed message was promptly deleted and that “the Asian Cup local organising committee do not believe the email to be accessible, recoverable or stored anywhere else in their systems”.
